Chapter 256: Book 4 Chapter 23.3: Die Harlan

“Hey boss,” Kim said. “I notice there are some terrorists stuck to the ceiling, I assume that’s you?”

“Yeah, though that’s all I’ve got so far,” Vell said. “Another bunch chased me off. I’m in the basements right now, trying to find my way closer to Freddy’s lab.”

“You need a hand?”

“Yeah, you’ve got the photographic memory, after all. I’m in the basement full of creepy mannequins that try to sneak up on you when you aren’t looking -one second.”

He turned around and glared at a mannequin that froze mid-step.

“Fuck off,” Vell said. The mannequin fucked off. “Anyway, do I go right or left from here?”

“Left. You can get out from any of the rooms past the acid storage basement, but if you hit the one with the collection of hamster wheels, you’ve gone too far.”

“Got it, thanks.”

Vell hung up and turned around to do a quick check up on the mannequin horde. They had all started creeping towards the door he’d come through. He thought that was weird for exactly half a second before realizing what it meant.

“Shit.”

He ducked into the next room on the left moments before the door popped open and the first terrorist stepped through.

“Jesus!”

A quick, panicked burst of gunfire obliterated the nearest mannequin before the terrorist realized it was motionless. His comrades examined the carnage as the man who’d taken the lead steadied his panicked heartbeat.

“Why the fuck is there a basement full of mannequins?”

“Why the fuck are any of these basements like this? A ghost told me to fuck off.”

“Well that’s not that weird, it lives here,” another added. “Or it’s dead here, I guess.”

“Just shut up and find Vell.”

Vell was still close enough to hear the terrorists say his name, which was worrying on several levels. Not only did it make them more of a threat to him, it also meant they might try to directly target his friends in an attempt to intimidate him. Skye could handle anything, of course, but Alex’s magic was still a little iffy, and Freddy and Goldie were all but helpless in most situations. Even when the deaths were temporary, he’d still rather avoid them, if possible.

Several seconds later, Vell remembered that the Michael’s were also probably in danger. He supposed he had to rescue them too.

Before he could rescue them, or anyone else, he had to get himself out of this mess. He still had a solid lead on the terrorists, but because these basements were so rarely used, he was leaving a pretty clear trail in the dust wherever he went. A thought occurred, then a second thought, and then those two thoughts collided and created a plan.

Vell’s pursuers caught up to his thought, and found a dusty trail of footprints leading up the stairs.

“He must’ve gone back up!”

“Wait a minute,” another said. He pointed downwards. “Don’t those footprints look weird to you?”

The terrorists took a closer look, at footprints that were obviously wider than the others, and slightly askew.

“I think this is a fakeout. We know he can turn invisible, maybe he doubled back through his own footprints.”

“If that were the case, we would’ve bumped into him. He probably just came around the corner a little fast and stumbled.”

“Anyone smart enough to make people float is smart enough to-”

The terrorist briefly looked up at an empty ceiling.

“What?”

“Oh, I thought for a second he might have hidden on the ceiling. Nevermind.”

A single stone rune clacked onto the floor in the middle of the terrorist group, and a dome of spherical energy appeared around them. Seconds later, Vell Harlan dropped down from the ceiling, fully visible once again.

“For the record, I can be invisible and on the ceiling at the same time,” Vell said. He slapped the impenetrable dome they were surrounded in. “So, while I’ve got you here, anyone mind telling me what your evil plan is?”

“We’re not the villain’s here,” one of his new captives said. “We’re going to correct history’s greatest mistake.”

“What, you want to go back in time and make sure Hitler wins World War 2?”

“No! Why is that the first thing everyone assumes?”

“Well you’re a bunch of heavily armed white terrorists, most people in that category are Nazi’s,” Vell said. “Tell me what you’re actually after, then.”

“No. You called me a Nazi.”

“I didn’t call you a Nazi, I assumed you might be a Nazi,” Vell said. “There’s a difference.”

The terrorists turned their back on Vell and sat down inside the bubble, deliberately ignoring any further questions. Vell rolled his eyes and got back to business.

***

“Okay, that’s got to be most of the terrorists at this point, right?”

“I have no way of knowing,” Agent Fleming admitted. “There’s at least fifty, based on our observations.”

“And I’ve taken out maybe like twenty-something. So let’s be optimistic and say halfway.”

“Pragmatism generally serves better than-”

“Let’s be optimistic,” Vell said, more insistently.

“Right. I suppose optimism is all I have to offer, unfortunately,” Agent Fleming said.

“Actually, there is something you could do for me,” Vell said.

“Name it.”

“I’ve got an idea, but I need a little more gear to implement it,” Vell said. “Could you go find Professor Nguyen and ask if I can use her lab?”

Agent Fleming stared at the phone for a second.

“You’re in the middle of a terrorist attack and you want to ask for permission?”

“She’s very serious about people not touching her stuff,” Vell said. “It’ll make more sense when you meet her.”

It made a lot of sense when Fleming met her. In spite of her frail appearance, Professor Nguyen nearly burned a hole in his head with a glare when he approached uninvited.

“So you are the ‘Agent’ who has left a student to resolve a hostage situation, then?”

It took Fleming a few seconds to muster his ability to speak.

“There is a lot at work, ma’am, and-”

Trying to make excuses only made things worse. Fleming actually had to turn around and avert his gaze to avoid being crippled by Nguyen’s almighty glare.

“I’m here to ask a question on behalf of Vell Harlan, ma’am,” Fleming said. “He’d like permission to use your workshop.”

“Oh. Yes, you may tell Vell Harlan he has free rein of my facilities. He will be expected to clean up after himself, of course.”

Fleming took that as the end of the conversation and retreated as fast as possible.

“You were right, that woman is terrifying.”

“I know, if she were the one stuck here she’d have already glared all the terrorists into submission,” Vell said. “Anyway, am I good to use her workshop?”

“Yes, she says it’s fine. But you have to clean up afterwards.”

“I was going to anyway,” Vell said. He would not imagine leaving a mess for Professor Nguyen, even if she weren’t terrifying. She’d helped save his life once, she deserved the courtesy of a cleanup. Vell was already outside, so he headed through the door and got to work.

He grabbed a few basalt slates and started carving, as his idea required a few more obscure runes he didn’t already have. It also required a lot of batteries, a pair of gloves, and a little inspiration from Helena.

***

“It’s been a while since we’ve seen any sign of your boyfriend,” Alan said. “You think he’s found a nice safe corner to hide in?”

“No, I think he’s created an elaborate gizmo to whoop all your asses,” Skye said. “And I think you know I’m right. Otherwise you wouldn’t be getting all the hostages in one room.”

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As more and more time had passed with no sign of Vell, Alan had grown more and more paranoid. Since Freddy had already figured out his plan anyway, the separate workforces were no longer necessary for secrecy, and he had begun to bring all his hostage students together, and called all his scouting parties back. It would hopefully make the work faster, and his fortified position more secure, though it did come with increased risk of banter.

“Goldie! You’re okay,” Freddy said, as his friend got dragged into the room. “You’re- why is she gagged?”

“She bit me,” said a wounded terrorist.

“Well you made her mad,” Freddy said. Goldie made a few muffled noises and nodded at Freddy’s arm. “Yes, I’m sure you bit him harder than the eel bit me.”

Goldie made a satisfied grunt and then got back to her feet. She got back to work while Alex, Skye, and the other non-productive students sat against a wall. Alex sat quietly until the terrorists stepped far enough away that she felt comfortable whispering to Skye.

“Any plans now?”

“Yeah. I’m going to stay handcuffed and be quiet.”

“Skye, I guess this somehow feeds into a fantasy you have of Vell being macho, or something, but-”

“It’s not that,” Skye said. “Mostly. I’m Vell’s girlfriend, and Alan knows it. When things start to go bad for him—which should be about two minutes, give or take—he’s going to think I’m his exit strategy. He’ll grab me and bail, and hopefully leave the rest of you alone.”

“That’s...very likely, actually,” Alex admitted.

“When that happens, you get to Freddy, let him wrench you free or something. Good?”

“Good.”

One of the terrorists was coming back around, so they shut up and went back to playing the part of ideal hostage. Skye checked the clock in the central lab and started counting down from her two-minute guess. One minute, thirty seconds, ten seconds, five, four, three, two, one...

“Hey, he’s coming!”

“Right on time,” Skye mumbled to herself.

Alan went to the window and looked out. Though he was still distant, the unmistakably narrow silhouette of Vell Harlan was approaching.

“That’s the man who’s been making fools of us all day? He’d break in half in a stiff breeze!”

“Rude,” Alex said. Skye kept her mouth shut. Vell had gotten knocked over by a low-speed wind turbine once. Being tall but skinny gave him a lot of surface area with not a lot of mass. It was just physics.

“Just shoot him,” Alan demanded. No one shot him. Alan waited, and his men continued not shooting. “What is wrong with you?”

“Well, I’m just thinking, the guy can turn invisible make holes and forcefields, trap people in bubbles,” someone said. “He’s probably not just walking at us in a straight line without some kind of plan, right?”

“Yeah, he’s got to have some kind of energy shield that’s going to bounce our bullets right back at us, or something.”

“If he doesn’t just make our guns explode right away,” someone else mumbled.

“Our make some kind of tentacle thing attack us,” another said with a shudder.

“Well let’s fucking find out,” Alan snapped. He grabbed the rifle from the nearest terrorist, took aim at Vell, and fired a single shot. The bullet hit Vell dead center in the chest and passed right through. At the opposite end of the room, a door clicked open.

“Illusion rune,” Vell said. Then he held up one gloved hand and aimed a finger right at the clustered group of terrorists. With a quick twitch of his thumb, their guns began to glow white-hot.

Any spell could be replicated via runes, if one used enough of them, and Vell had used a few dozen to duplicate Helena’s spell to superheat guns. He’d turned the temperature down a little, to avoid molten metal really hurting anyone, but the guns were still too hot for anyone to hold safely. It could only affect a few at time, however, so Vell had to quickly turn his finger to another group of terrorists and superheat their guns as well. A few more who still had functioning guns took aim and fired, so Vell held up his other hand. The forcefield woven into the other glove negated all the kinetic energy of the bullets, dropping them harmlessly to the ground rather than risking any potentially injurious ricochets.

While the bullets were flying to no real effect, they were still flying. Most of the student hostages hit the deck -as did Alan, who was smart enough to keep himself and his gun out of the area of effect of Vell’s gun-destroying magic nonsense. He crawled beneath his men’s line of fire until he found Skye.

“You, with me,” he said, as he pointed his still-functioning gun right at Skye. She played the part of terrified hostage, but gave a knowing nod to Alex as she allowed herself to be dragged out of the room.

The second the door closed behind them, Alex scrambled across the floor towards Freddy’s workbench. She made it about halfway there before coming around a corner and bonking directly into Freddy, who was frantically crawling the other direction. Thankfully his frizzy hair made a good shock absorber.

“Freddy,” Alex said. “I was looking for you.”

“I was looking for you,” Freddy admitted. Thankfully there were still bullets whizzing overhead, or Alex might have blushed.

“Can you get me out of these handcuffs?”

“Only if you hold very still,” Freddy said, as he held up a buzzsaw.

“I’ll manage.”

As Vell superheated another group of guns, the terrorists got the bright idea to pick up the blunt instruments and tools around the laboratory as weapons instead. Some of them rushed Vell, and got met with a force-field for their trouble. After that, some of them grabbed the hostages and held them up as if they were human shields. One towards the front of the group grabbed Dr. Professor Michael and dragged him to his feet.

“Unhand me, you degenerate!”

“Shut it! You, Harlan, cut it out or I’ll cave his head in!”

Vell did roll his eyes, but he stopped in his tracks.

“That’s right. Now take the gloves off or I’ll crush him like a bug.”

“Do as he says, Harlan,” Dr. Professor Michael said. “The contents of my skull are more valuable than the rest of this room put together.”

“Dad,” Michael Jr said.

“Worry not, Junior, your intellect makes up roughly ninety-five percent of the cumulative total I’m referring to,” Michael Senior said. Vell was once again baffled by his ability to be an asshole and a kind of good dad at the same time. He kept his gloves on anyway.

“I said take them off!”

At that point, in the midst of the chaos in the room, a buzzsaw stopped whirring.

The wrench the hostage-taking terrorist was wielding as a club flew out of his hands and ricocheted across the lab, embedding itself in a far wall. Alex leveled a finger gun of her own at the next terrorist holding a hostage.

“Oh fuck, there’s two of them,” one of the terrorists mumbled.

“One point five, really,” Alex said. “I am not as smart, not as tough, and not as experienced as Vell-”

She turned to face a terrorist near the window and lowered thick-lensed glasses in a brutal glare.

“-But I’m also not as gentle.”

“What’s that mean?”

The terrorist got flung backwards through a window, sailing about thirty feet through the air before hitting the quad and starting to roll.

“It means that,” Alex said. “Anybody else want a lesson?”

Several dozen makeshift weapons and actual weapons clattered to the ground as the terrorists decided that they could barely handle one magic lunatic, much less two.

“Smart,” Alex said. “I’ll wrap up here, Vell, their boss took Skye.”

“On it,” Vell said. He headed out the door Alex pointed out and headed down the halls. There was no trail to follow, but there were only so many places a lone terrorist could be heading. Vell caught up to Skye and Alan right where he expected to: at the docks, with Alan leading Skye towards one of the docked research vessels.

“Not a move,” Alan said, as he raised his gun to Skye’s head. “I see so much as a finger twitch, my trigger finger twitches, got it?”

Vell stood perfectly still. He locked eyes with Skye, glanced at Alan, and then watched silently as Skye glanced downwards at her hands, then back at Vell.

“Sure,” Vell said. “I assume you want your way off this island?”

“I want to finish what I started, but you seem intent on ruining everything,” Alan said. “I take her, I take my boat, you tell that warship offshore not to follow me, and once I’m a safe distance away, I’ll dump her in the ocean and we’ll see if the marine biologist can swim long enough for you to fish her out.”

“Okay, sure, just one thing,” Vell said. “You know what I’m capable of, right?”

“Trust me, friend, I’ll be so far gone even someone as mad as you won’t be able to find me.”

“Not my point,” Vell said. “What I mean is, knowing what I’m capable of...what do you think my girlfriend can do?”

Alan had exactly half a second to ponder that question before Skye slammed backwards into him. His gun fired once, wildly, into the empty space where Skye’s head had just been, and then Skye grabbed his gun hand and used the leverage to throw Alan over her shoulder and slam him into the ground. She ripped the gun out of his hands and tossed it into the ocean just for good measure.

“So, was the one liner good enough?”

“Felt a little self-aggrandizing, but it was good,” Skye said. She’d needed the banter to distract Alan while she removed her cuffs, and a good one-liner was always nice. “I’ll run it by dad later, see what he thinks.”

Skye gave him a kiss on the cheek as Vell walked up and popped out a rune to put Alan in a bubble of energy. He was only just recovering from Skye’s judo throw when the dome of energy appeared above him, and he let out a defeated groan of pain as the barrier enclosed him.

“So, any chance you’re going to tell me what this is about now?”

“We wanted to correct history’s greatest mistake.”

“Okay, so I know that’s not anything about Hitler,” Vell said. “So what the fuck is it about? Stalin? The sack of Rome? The Late Bronze Age Collapse?”

“Why are you assuming it’s something violent?”

“Just tell me what it is,” Vell demanded. He needed to understand their motivation to stop them better on the next loop. “You already lost anyway, what am I going to do, make you lose more?”

“Fine. You should no the gravity of your mistake. We were trying to give humanity it’s great gift, you idiot, we were going to fix everything!”

Alan got to his feet and pressed his hands and face against the forcefield bubble.

“We were going to stop Fox from canceling Firefly!”

Vell stared at Alan in dead silence for ten consecutive seconds. Skye was the first to break the standoff.

“Fucking what? What is Firefly?”

“It’s some old sci-fi show,” Vell sighed. “I think Freddy watched it once. He said it’s okay.”

“Okay? It’s the greatest television show of all time, and it was canceled after only one season! We wanted to go back and make sure it got a four-season run!”

“Four?” Skye snapped. “You kidnapped like fifty people and wanted to warp the fabric of spacetime for three more seasons? Not shooting for six seasons and a movie?”

“Well you want to give it enough time to really explore the setting and characters, but not so long the ideas run out and the whole thing starts to drag out and rehash plots,” Alan said. “Four seasons is good.”

Vell turned around and walked away from Alan. He needed fresh air. Or as fresh as the air could be with that forcefield overhead. He took a seat on one of the campus’s many benches, stripped off his rune-covered gloves, and put his head in his hands.

“God, this is so fucking stupid,” Vell said.

“It really is,” Skye said. “But hey. Nobody got hurt, and now it’s over.”

“Huh,” Vell said. The daily apocalypse was supposed to have at least one casualty, but nobody was dead. So far.

The moment Skye finished her sentence, the bubble over the campus disappeared.

“I guess whatever failsafe did that shut off,” Skye said. “Now that it’s-”

“Oh fuck!”

Vell stood up and started sprinting towards the center of campus -just as several floating terrorists started floating further and further upwards. Their anti-gravity runes hadn’t worn off yet. Vell watched them sail upwards until they were mere blips in the sky, and then they vanished. He grabbed tufts of his hair in distress and stood there until Alex caught up to him.

“Well,” Alex said. “I guess we know who the fatalities of today’s apocalypse are.”

Vell let out a very quiet whimper of distress.

***

Vell stayed on the docks and watched until the boat carrying a legion of would-be terrorists were out of sight. Samson stayed with him the entire time.

“I’m surprised that worked,” he said.

“They like the show, and Nathan Fillion’s in it,” Vell said. “If Nathan Fillion says don’t do terrorism, they don’t do terrorism.”

“Right, and you just had a celebrity’s phone number lying around because…?”

“He owed us a favor. Back in first year me, Lee, and Harley saved him from his evil clone, Nathan Fillioff.”

“Right. You want to go get some pancakes?”

“Always.”

Samson led the way towards pancakes, though he did have one concern.

“I know it wasn’t the apocalypse, but should we still deal with that whole eel teleporting incident?”

“Alex is in that area anyway, apparently she’s handling it.”

“Still, maybe-”

“Samson, I accidentally sent several people into the stratosphere,” Vell said. “You do whatever you want, I’m taking the rest of the day off.”